Provenance

Description

The present work, drawn purely in pen and brown ink, bears witness to the grip of the Orient on Delacroix's fertile imagination long after his seminal 1832 journey to Morocco. Highly comparable, both in subject matter and execution, to another energetically drawn sheet sold in these rooms in 2016, dated 1848,1 which was, itself, described as a première pensée for a watercolour of circa 1850, formerly in the Krugier collection.2 Ultimately all three of these works relate to Delacroix's virtuoso oil, Moroccan Horseman Crossing a Ford, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.3